The practice of mandatory recourse to linguistic experts’ opinions in cases pertaining to racial, ethnic, and other types of hatred and hostility, has caused the vast development of different approaches to the analysis of the texts. During last ten years, numerous methods for identifying “verbal extremism” have been recommended. It has been suggested that the evolution of Russian legal linguistics has not yet resulted in a “common theoretical basis for linguistic investigation in court that is shared by all experts”. The current status of the proposed approach to studying texts in order to identify “hostility and hate” demonstrates both the difficulty of establishing a general theoretical basis for forensic linguistics as a whole and the contradictions that arise in applying the numerous methodologies that exist in Russian science for studying “extremist” texts.

Even though the EU’s conditionality per se did not make Lithuanian people more tolerant, it may have created the conditions for winning hearts and minds in the long run. Despite the fact that the majority of LGBT persons continue to hide their sexual or gender identity (in 2012, 81% did so at school and 55% at work), the problems they face are no longer invisible, and even backlash-like developments contribute to sparking a debate. On June 18, 2016 a march for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights, known as the Baltic Pride parade, took place in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius.

There were two disparate and somehow polemic tendencies, or overarching discourses, among the parental movements presented at the workshop on Södertörn University in May 2014. The first was the nationalist discourse, whilst the other predominated discourse was concentrated on promoting new norms in parenting.

Iryna Dovgan is one of several women that helped Ukrainian soldiers. But she was caught and imprisoned for several days. She was beaten, injured and humiliated. Today she stands up for her rights and is running in the election campaign.

Human rights activism in Russia can be a dangerous ordeal for those involved in it. How do these dedicated people nonetheless manage to advance human rights in Russia? Here an interview with three human rights activists.

As an EU-member, Lithuania has to a large extent set up institutional mechanisms to combat homophobia. It has implemented anti-discrimination laws that are roughly in line with EU norms. At the same time, the country does not allow same-sex marriage, fails to recognize same-sex partnership (or indeed any form of civil partnership), and does not allow homosexual couples to adopt children. A still greater problem, note the authors, is that the political and cultural climate remains deeply hostile towards homosexuality and towards recognizing the rights of individuals of a minority sexual orientation.

In this essay there is a discussion whether the recent developments in the Serbian and Croatian legislations on minority rights represent one occasion on which the EU’s informal engagement has exerted a beneficial influence. It is also noted that, throughout the last decade, the roles of Serbia and Croatia as kin states to ethnic Serbs in Croatia and ethnic Croats in Serbia has been constructive.

On February 18, Latvia held a referendum on amendments to the Constitution (Satversme) that would make Russian a second official language. Discussions about this referendum have been very emotional. The sensitivity of the question resulted in the second-highest turnout of voters (71.12% ) for a referendum, just slightly lower than in the 2003 referendum on joining the European Union (71.49%). The proposal was rejected, so Russian did not become the second official language of Latvia and therefore an EU language.

A number of representatives of the opposition in Belarus participated in a seminar “The Way Forward for Belarus”. The seminar addressed such issues as the difficulties experienced by the opposition in working for democracy and human rights in Belarus and what the outside world can do to support their work.